Will Wildfire Evacuations Be A Superspreader Event?
Scattered populations could bring back contagions from across the country.
Today, wildfire evacuees will begin returning to Yellowknife, while residents of other communities in the Northwest Territories that are still threatened by active fires await the green light for themselves. Thousands of cars will wend their way through fire zones eager for the comforts of home. Some may bring with them something that they didn't plan on and can’t see: a possibly asymptomatic Covid case or other infection.
Scattering 30,000 evacuees across the country will have exposed them to a broad range of populations in many different places. Most NWT displaced residents ended up in Alberta, where governments broke the law by overriding their chief medical officer of health to decide Covid policy entirely on purely ideological rather than evidence-based grounds. Despite virtually eliminating testing for Covid to hide the scale of the problem, Alberta has clearly demonstrated the highest per capita excess mortality rate among provinces since the pandemic began, and under its current science denying premier there’s no hope of improved public health measures. Other evacuees landed in British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, and even the Atlantic provinces.
